Carl Hiassen is hilarious. I laughed out loud many times listening to this. His turn of phrase and bluntness are the best.

Of course the ultimate plot fails and one part of me was glad because the deranged journalist who organized the terrorist group deserved to get his in the end, and another part of me understood what he wanted to do about south Florida and sympathized. I almost wished that he could have run everyone off and turned the land over to whom it belonged.

The death by plastic alligator of the chairman of the chamber of commerce was priceless. The coffin coffee table was a nice touch too. I liked the snake bombing of the cruise ship (after my experience on a cruise, it was just the kind of scene I would pay money to see).

http://eor.livejournal.com/257762.htm... ( )

Any book that starts out with the discovery of a dead, mutilated midget
stuffed in a bright red American Tourister suitcase will grab my attention
right away. LOL In this book, a small band of disgruntled and oddly
matched terrorists take it upon themselves to try to empty Florida of
tourists and snowbirds and turn it back into the lush wilderness it once
was. A half-crazed but extremely smart newspaper columnist, a washed up
former Miami Dolphin football star, a lunatic Cuban (born and raised in New
Jersey, of all places) and a quietly lethal Seminole Indian, wealthy beyond
belief from Indian bingo parlors, all have motives of their own, but
together they make a decidedly formidible foe. Tracked reluctantly by a
private detective with a personal ax to grind against the columnist, they
plow their way through Miami's tourist population, kidnapping and murdering
randomly selected people, just for publicity to scare the beejezus out of
the rest of them and make them all want to GO HOME!

Like his other books, Hiaasen has created a cast of characters with so many
quirks and foibles you can't help but embrace them. Even the "bad guys"
have qualities to admire. Hiaasen writes with wit and finesse and his books
are always very satisfying. This one was written back in the mid 1980s and
is a little dated, but still a great read. (In one place, the detective has
a hell of a time finding a telephone and I guess I'm a creature of the
current times because I kept thinking, "Just use your cell phone!" LOL)

I do heartily recommend any of the Hiaasen books I've read and this one
happily joins that list. ( )

I am deeply disappointed. I picked up this book hoping to love it as much as I've loved all of the other novels I have by Hiaasen. His standard plot and character line-up were present, but the overall feel and tone of the novel was completely different from his more recent works.

As with his other novels (at least those I've read), Hiaasen has a likeable but also fallible middle-aged white man as the main character. Said man ends up with an attractive and intelligent woman who is significantly younger than him. The book, of course, revolves around Florida and the over-development of the natural land and disregard of nature in general by the current capitalistic society which promotes tourism and real estate at the expense of wildlife, their habitats, and the environment.

However, in this novel, the main character you sympathize with (in this case, Brian Keyes), is not the environmentalist out to wake people up. In Tourist Season, I found myself not sympathizing with the role of the naturalist, Skip Wiley. Wiley was completely unlikeable. He felt no compunction in murdering innocent people (if you count naive tourists as innocents) in order to save other life forms he has decided have more value. The character was a study in hypocrisy. He wanted people to leave Florida so it could return to it’s natural beauty. Yet this same character drove vehicles which pollute the environment, was sanctimonious in his diatribes, messed with ecosystems (brought a crocodile into a saltwater habitat), and had no sense of reason or logic. This was upsetting for me as I usually agree with the main character in Hiaasen’s books about the “wrongness” of it all. With this book, I forced myself to finish in the hopes that it would change my mind about it or the character. It did not.

Hiaasen usually has a dark comedy effect and the characters are eccentric and are bordering the line of what we consider sane (sometimes crossing the line), but always drawing the reader to be sympathetic towards the cause and purpose of the book. In Tourist Season, I felt no sympathy towards the leaders of reformation and it was frustrating to be rooting for the downfall of the environmental activist in this book.

If you are looking for a political, environmental, and darkly humorous book, you’d be better off with selecting one of Hiaasen’s other works.

I have read other Carl Hiaasen books and have enjoyed them. This one, I completely disliked. I didn't care about the characters. The plot did not carry me along. I am ashamed to admit that I even finished the book, but I did. I'm trying to decide if I should include it in the stack of books to donate to our local library, but based on other reviewers, it seems that some people enjoyed this one. ( )